Parking in a garage or along a street in a large city often requires payment, which is generally made via a meter using paper currency and coins, as well as credit or debit cards. With advances in technology, including wireless communication and location tracking, payment can also be made via a smart device, such as a mobile phone or tablet. For example, upon finding a vacant parking space, a driver parks his car and activates a computer application for entering a location of the parked car and a time at which parking is to begin. After returning to the parked car, the user again accesses the application to provide a time at which the parking ends. Based on the parking duration of the car, a charge is applied to an account for the driver.
However, drivers frequently forget to terminate parking via the computer application, which results in increased parking charges that can be difficult to reverse. Unfortunately, at this time, conventional computers, including servers, do not currently know how nor when to terminate a session monitored by an application, such as a parking application. Leaving such parking sessions running without termination leads to additional parking charge to the driver without actual usage of the parking space. The driver then often will want to request an adjustment of the parking charges, to remove the incorrect additional charge. A procedure to facilitate such requests via a computer, including a mechanism for the driver to prove that the car indeed only occupied the parking space for a shorter period, requires many additional computational resources. For example, when the complaint is facilitated via a web portal, additional servers and software will be required to receive and validate the driver's complaint, and initiate payment refund requiring memory and processing resources that would otherwise be unnecessary. Further, high numbers of drivers requesting such changes or refunds can fill a queue of communications from drivers increasing response times and preventing other drivers with other parking questions from obtaining assistance in a timely manner. Accordingly, reducing a number of such requests for refunds by terminating parking sessions can increase available computer memory, reduce a queue size, and decrease unnecessary computer processing, which can result in increasing a speed of the computer based on a lower number sessions maintained and people serviced.
Additionally, allowing parking sessions to continue after a driver has left the parking space requires computational resources during the extended parking session that would not be necessary if the session was terminated at a correct time. For instance, once parking is initiated via a parking application, a session is created for the driver and stored in a queue for monitoring until the parking is terminated. If the parking is not terminated when the driver leaves the parking space, the parking session remains in the queue and computational resources for monitoring the session are required. Additionally, leaving parking sessions pending when they could be terminated requires additional memory to store those sessions. Servers are limited in how many sessions can run at a single time and thus, preserving memory for all actual pending sessions is important, by removing sessions for which the driver has already left the parking space, but not terminated the parking session.
Accordingly, a system and method for conveniently monitoring and ensuring payment for parking is needed to prevent increased parking fees. Preferably, the system and method will automatically initiate and terminate parking and consider parking permits of the user, as well as third party authorizations to park to prevent double charging the user. The termination of such parking reduces computational resources, which are unnecessary, and further reduces memory required to store parking sessions that can be terminated.